The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine has named Dr. Gary D. Kruh as director of the UIC Cancer Center.

Kruh comes to UIC after serving as an attending physician at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. At Fox Chase Kruh was an associate in medical oncology and served as acting head of pharmacology.

"Even though he just arrived, Dr. Kruh has already begun the progress toward obtaining National Cancer Institute cancer center funding by providing multidisciplinary leadership and bringing each of the six
health science colleges together around the goal of building an
excellent cancer center," said Dr. Joseph Flaherty, dean of the UIC College of Medicine.

Much of Kruh's research is focused on understanding factors that affect the sensitivity of cancers to chemotherapeutic agents. He has an international reputation for his research on cell membrane drug transporters.

"Identifying the resistance factors holds the promise of improving cancer treatments by guiding the development of agents that either circumvent these factors or take advantage of them," he says.

Kruh currently chairs the NIH Drug Discovery and Molecular Pharmacology Study Section. His clinical interest is treatment of lung cancer patients.

He received a doctorate in biochemistry in 1979 from Baylor University College of Medicine and his medical degree in 1982. He completed his residency at Johns Hopkins in 1984 in internal medicine and his fellowship in medical oncology at Johns Hopkins and the National Cancer Institute in 1987.

The UIC Cancer Center is comprised of researchers and clinicians from the colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Applied Health Sciences, Engineering, Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Public Health. Extramural cancer-relevant funding totals over $30 million.

UIC ranks among the nation's top 50 universities in federal research funding and is Chicago's largest university with 25,000 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state's major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world. For more information about UIC, visit www.uic.edu